Father's Day Murder (27 page)

She looked at me with a tearstained face. When she smiled, it was a bitter, sad smile. “You came here just to tell me a story?”

“I came here to ask you if you killed Arthur Wien.”

A shiver went through her. She looked at her right hand. The fingers were bent and gnarled. “How could I have killed him? I can hardly hold my bow any more.”

25

I knew I was right. And I knew Joseph was right too; it was circumstantial. Without a confession I could prove nothing. I drove uptown and parked at a meter on Broadway in the Eighties. From there I walked to the Meyers’ building and rang the bell. Judy answered and let me in. I felt sick to my stomach as I walked down the hall to their apartment.

“Hi,” Judy called. “Come on in.”

Joe came into the living room as we sat down. He smiled and greeted me, then sat in the chair near the windows.

“You don’t look so good,” Judy said to me. “Can I get you something?”

“No thanks.” I was sitting where I could face them both. “I know about Marsha’s accident,” I said. “I know that Arthur Wien was in the car with her. I know he paid her to keep her quiet. I even know where the money came from.”

They both looked too surprised to speak. Finally Joe said, “This is a little too much too fast. Who told you these things?”

“Almost everyone I talked to contributed, but they said small things and it’s taken a while for me to put it all together. I know Arthur Wien dated young girls. Your daughter wasn’t the only one. I can’t tell you how terrible I feel about what that accident did to your daughter and the
life she loved. You felt he had to pay for it, and you got your opportunity on Father’s Day.”

Joe looked down at his lap and Judy got up and walked toward his chair. “We were friends,” he said finally. “Friends don’t do those things to friends.”

“There’s nothing to say, Joe,” Judy said. “Chris is just guessing and everything she says is wrong.”

He put his hand on his wife’s arm and held it there. “She isn’t wrong, Judy. It’s the way it happened. We both know it.”

My heart was pounding. “I’d like you to turn yourself in. I’ll drive you to the police station.”

“He can’t do that,” Judy said, her voice losing its normal calm tone. “They’ll lock him up and he won’t survive.”

“We can call a lawyer,” I began.

“Do you know what Arthur Wien did?” Judy said. “He destroyed the life of one of the most promising musicians in this country. He had no conscience. He thought of no one but himself. After he hit the tree, he told Marsha he would go for help and she should say nothing about his being with her. He used a telephone to call the police so no one would be able to identify him. What was he doing with her anyway? He had been living with Cindy for years and they had set a date for their wedding. He was cheating on the woman he was going to marry. In the end that’s what Arthur Wien was, a cheat. He pretended to be our friend so he could have access to our beautiful daughter.”

“Call the lawyer, Judy,” her husband said. “It’s time. I have to turn myself in.”

I left them making arrangements with their lawyer. When I got to my car, I decided to make one more stop before going home. I cut through Central Park to the East
Side and drove down to the Koches’ building. Ellen Koch was there and she told the doorman to send me up. She didn’t offer me a seat, just stood in the foyer and looked at me.

“You said you lent money once to Arthur Wien but it had nothing to do with the manuscript.”

“That’s right.”

“About two years ago?”

“About that.”

“Do you know what he used it for?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I gather it was a substantial sum.”

“It was a lot of money, yes.”

I was sure she knew. “It paid Marsha Meyer, Joe and Judy’s daughter, to be quiet. He was driving the car when she had her accident.”

“How did you find out?”

“I put everything together. I’m sorry.”

“No sorrier than I am. It was the reason I broke off our relationship, what happened to Marsha. I couldn’t believe he had done it, but he had. He told me. Have you seen her?”

“This afternoon. She didn’t admit anything. But her life, her music …”

“Thank you for coming by.”

There was a pay phone in the garage and I called Dr. Horowitz. I told him I hoped someone could post bond for Joe Meyer; he was too sick a man to stay in jail. I had some money put away myself, I said, but Dr. Horowitz said it would be taken care of. He had a patient so the conversation was necessarily short.

I got home in time to read a story to Eddie. Halfway
through, Jack pulled into the driveway, his grin telling me it hadn’t been a killer of a day. I was glad his wasn’t. Mine was.

I learned from one of many phone calls that night that Joe Meyer had been released until his arraignment the following morning. His lawyer guaranteed his appearance and I didn’t doubt he would show up. In fact, I showed up myself, having dropped Eddie off early at Elsie’s. Arraignment is at One Hundred Centre Street in downtown Manhattan. When I finally found my way to the right place, I had quite a shock. Every one of the Morris Avenue Boys had shown up, five aging men in dark suits, pale shirts, and probably sixty-dollar ties: a medical researcher who might win a Nobel Prize, a lawyer whose wife had figured in a forty-year-old story of love and deception, a gastroenterologist who was off the hook for murder, a teacher who cared about his students, a businessman who knew how it felt to be up there facing a judge, accused of a felony, instead of back here safe behind the railing and presumed to be innocent. When the question of bail came up and the judge granted it, a rather large sum, all five of them moved forward to offer to cover it. Bernie Reskin did not have the money but he had brought the deed to his house. I had seen a lot of tears in the last few days but today was my turn. I sat on the hard bench in the courtroom and cried.

The hearing was very brief. Joe pled not guilty, bail was set, and a date chosen for the next court appearance. Joe was released a few minutes later. I went to the nearest ladies room and found Judy Meyer there.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s not your fault. You were doing something honorable.”

“At the reunion dinner, you asked Robin Horowitz to change places with you so you wouldn’t have to sit next to Arthur Wien.”

“She saw Arthur come in. I was sitting next to the last two empty chairs and she realized I wouldn’t get through an evening rubbing shoulders with him. She got up and said she wanted to sit next to him. We traded places. Thank God,” she added.

“You’re the one, aren’t you? You did it.”

She paled. “You heard Joe yesterday.”

“I heard him.”

“They’ll never try him.”

“I know.”

“And I’ll take good care of him for as long as I have him.”

I picked up Eddie and took him home. We had a nice conversation over lunch. He had had a good time at Elsie’s.

“Maybe we’ll swim this afternoon,” I said.

“Wim,” Eddie said with a breathy
W
.

“You have a new bathing suit and we can go to the pool after your nap.”

“Pool.”

“Yes. Remember we looked at the pool last week?”

“Pool.”

I leaned over and kissed him.

After my own lunch I took
The Lost Boulevard
outside and sat in my chair under an old tree and read the last chapter. As I had thought, it was a wrapping up kind of
chapter. The narrator took the subway to the Bronx to see his mother. It was a New York summer day, hot and very humid. By the time he got up to the street level, his shirt was sticking to his back. He walked from the Concourse to Morris Avenue and up to the apartment he had grown up in. He was in his late twenties now and had a wife and a nice little apartment in the Village. I remembered Alice’s description of that first home they shared.

Inside his mother’s apartment every window was open, but the air was as still as the grains of sand in the egg timer on the kitchen stove. He unbuttoned another button on his shirt, but it did no good. Even the fan in the living room seemed to have stalled.

For the first time he looked at the apartment appraisingly. It seemed very rundown. Paint was chipping in almost every room, and he wondered how long it had been since the landlord had put a fresh coat of paint on any of the walls.

The kitchen in particular looked old and grimy. The linoleum on the floor was cracked and dirt was ingrained, never to be removed. The stove looked like something from a junkyard. He remembered it from twenty years ago, the nineteen-thirties, when he was a boy. The refrigerator, one of the old gas ones, was short by modern standards and had that metal thing on top that housed the fan. If it wasn’t an antique, it was surely close. The table wobbled. One of the chairs was missing.

In his shirt pocket he had a damp list of available apartments, some on the Concourse, some in Manhattan. He wondered if the Concourse buildings had become as rundown as this one or had retained the status that went back to prewar days. He showed the list to his mother. She sighed and made him a sandwich.

He told her the city was building a highway that would cut through the heart of 174th Street, that the noise of drilling through the rocks would be unbearable, that the dust and dirt that the drilling created would float into this apartment and sit on every surface, that when the highway was done there would be filthy trucks driving back and forth night and day. This was the time to leave it all behind.

She talked about the mothers of his friends. She told him how things were going with his father at work. She fanned her face with a Jewish newspaper. She couldn’t think of any reason to move.

After an hour or so, he kissed her good-bye and walked back to the Concourse. It was a long trip to the Village, but the D train would take him to West Fourth Street and his apartment was an easy walk from there. He looked up and down the Concourse, accepting finally that his parents would never live there. It was too late for them as it was too late for him. His life was elsewhere, not in the Bronx.

He went down the dark stairs to the subway and waited on the almost empty platform on the downtown side, inhaling the heat. About twenty feet away, a young pretty girl in a sleeveless cotton dress and black patent shoes stood waiting for the same train. She turned and saw him. He smiled and she smiled back. He started down the platform toward her, and the train came noisily into the station, blowing hot air. She got in one car and he got in another. He sat back on the old laquered straw seat and closed his eyes. The D train would take him to a better world.

26

There’s never anything clean about finishing a case. Someone is brought to what we call justice, but I am always left with a tremendous weight on my shoulders. Not only do I often feel sorry for the killer, as I did in this case, but I am left with information that puts me in a very awkward position. I do not like to lie and yet, who am I to dispense facts that are private?

I called George Fried and told him he had helped me a great deal and I would not disclose the fact that he was alive. I called Marge Beller and told her she had given me the precise piece of information that I needed to find Arthur Wien’s killer. And I promised not to disclose what she had told me.

I never asked Ellen Koch whether the money she lent to Arthur Wien to pay Marsha Meyer had been paid back because I didn’t think it was my business, but I did tell her her long affair with him would remain her secret.

And then there was Alice Wien, an innocent who had suffered because of her husband’s behavior. Only Ellen Koch and I knew where the missing pages of the manuscript were, but I did not tell Alice. Maybe some day Ellen would give them back to Alice, with or without an explanation, and make the manuscript whole and valuable.
People rise to unexpected heights sometimes; I hoped Ellen would. She would still have the dedication that Arthur Wien had written to her in his own hand. I will never know.

A couple of weeks after the arraignment of Joe Meyer, a large, heavy box was delivered to my house. I smiled at the store name on the address label, Neiman Marcus. I could tell the contents were larger than either a lipstick or a tie, and probably more expensive.

Inside were a dozen crystal wine glasses that took my breath away and a note thanking me from Robin and Mort Horowitz. I wondered if she had guessed who had killed Arthur Wien on Father’s Day. I wondered if Ellen had.

For myself, I wondered whether Joe had done it or if his wife had. Or if they had worked together. I don’t think I’ll ever know.

A CONVERSATION WITH LEE HARRIS

Q
.
Lee, your heroine, Christine Bennett, first appeared in 1992. But you have been a published novelist since 1975. Can you fill us in on your life before Chris?

A
. Under another name I wrote mainstream novels, the last of which came out in 1989. About that time I felt I needed a change in my life. Since I was a devoted reader of mysteries, I decided to write one of my own. I used an idea I’d had for about ten years, made it the first book in a series, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Q
.
We liked the author bio that appeared in your first novel—indicating that you were “at work on another book, and another book, and another book …” Indeed, that did happen. How many novels did you publish under your own name?

A
. Six. And I still feel I’d like to go on writing forever.

Q
.
Readers, and especially fans, are always curious about an established writer’s decision to adopt a pseudonym. Why, when you created Chris Bennett, did you?

A
. The mysteries were so different from my other books that my agent, the late Claire Smith, whom I loved and admired enormously, felt I should keep the two genres very separate, that the readers of my mainstream novels might be thrown for a loop by picking up a mystery. In fact, in many cases that hasn’t happened, but I still keep them separate.